"So you think
that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have
you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which
can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money
is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one
another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of
the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it
from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this
what you consider evil?

"When you accept
money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you
will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the
moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all
the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into
the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which
should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the
men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the
world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle
which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever
looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and
dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking
brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men
who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of
nothing but physical motions – and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of
all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that
money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you
mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's
capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the
expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the
expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the
ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted
or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his
ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has
produced.

"To trade by
means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom
that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power
to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man
who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain
for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy
them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the
unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men
must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not
their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry
the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that
the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of
goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but
your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they
offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with
reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins,
the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the
degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code
of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is
only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as
the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires,
but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who
attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind
by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not
purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will
not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value,
and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what
to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the
coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the
brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment,
ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert
him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which
he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the
reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who
does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own
fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves
him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted
him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his
wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think
that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty
parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the
fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not
serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your
means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your
livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is
corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud?
By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the
hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By
doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will
not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy
will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a
reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it
would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you
enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will
always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the
product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your
vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit.
Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say
it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know
and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is
the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your
effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his
soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and
he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it.
They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you
a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it
dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your
life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the
leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth
and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they
abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money
demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men
who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of
their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend
their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long.
They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for
centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be
forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the
guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will
see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on
those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who
are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and
the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society
establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize
the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such
looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to
disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it
from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production,
but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the
murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread
of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to
know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a
society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by
compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain
permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to
those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer
by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against
them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and
honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.
Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not
make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as
half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever
destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's
protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave
to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards
and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.
Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a
mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are
expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account
which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it
becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have
made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not
expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the
fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is
punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You
are.

"You stand in the
midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and
you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood –
money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why
the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's
history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose
method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers
bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of
money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when
wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions
once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long
as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there
was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and
starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as
aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers,
as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

"To the glory of
mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money
– and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this
means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the
first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no
fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and
slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the
highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to
name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it
contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the
phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words
before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized,
begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the
first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money'
hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were
the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the
looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your
proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your
greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent
factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of
whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he
sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip,
ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless
you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own
destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one
another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars.
Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out."

Ragnar Danneskjöld on Robin Hood

"I've chosen a special mission of my own. I'm after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in".
What man?
Robin Hood. He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich - or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.
What in blazes do you mean?
...
Ragnar: ... I have never robbed a private ship and never taken any private property. Nor have I ever robbed a military vessel - because the purpose of a military fleet is to protect from the violence the citizens who paid for it, which is the proper function of a government. But I have seized every lootcarrier that came within range of my guns, every government relief ship, subsidy ship, loan ship, gift ship, every vessel with a cargo of goods taken by force from some men for the unpaid, unearned benefit of others. I seized the boats that sailed under the flag of the idea which I am fighting: the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices - that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others - that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us - and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads doen on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord. This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is not remembered as a champion of property, but as a champion
of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is
held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity
with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not
produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who
became a symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of
rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not
belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every
mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to
dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote
his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this
foulest of creatures – the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor
and the blood of the rich – whom men have come to regard as the moral
idea." ". . . Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us?
That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human
symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will
be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive."

This in John Galt Speaking

John Galt's final speech can be read here. It's circa 66 pages long, but still highly worth of reading.

"We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt. There is a difference between our strike and all those practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endager you, not to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, accoring to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality - the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind." (1011)

Some extra quotations

"What's wealth but the means of expanding one's life? There's two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that's what I'm doing: I'm manufacturing time... I'm producing everything I need, I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life." (722)

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." (731)

"There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in the whole of human history. Every other kind and class has stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable - except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike." John Galt (738)